The message is in the mithai, dear neta

A politician is said to have once dismissed a rival by comparing him to a rasgulla: sweet, soft and easy to digest. Confectionery has long had political significance in India.

Delegates at the World Hindu Congress, recently held in Chicago, reportedly received a welcome gift of two boxes of laddoos, the sweetmeat traditionally distributed to celebrate an electoral victory.

However, the Chicago mithai conveyed an admonitive message: the laddoos in one were hard, and in the other, soft. The convener explained the soft laddoos represented the current status of Hindus, a community that purportedly can be easily broken and swallowed up, while the hard ones betoken a bonding that could not be fragmented.


The Chicago conference did not use the political parable of the two laddoos to refer to the ‘soft’ Hindutva of the anti-BJP Opposition and the hard variant of the Sangh Parivar.

Kheer— a preparation that harmoniously combines milk, rice and sugar — has had topical resonance in the political realm when one of the leading lights involved in the exercise made reference to this dish in the context of finding a recipe that would successfully bring together the disparate constituents of the proposed anti-BJP Grand Alliance.

Sweet talk aside, it remains to be seen whether, come 2019, it’s the NDA or the Mahagathbandhan that gets served its just desserts.